Rightmove: house prices decline
Home owners are now pricing their homes more realistically as the credit crunch continues, new analysis from Rightmove suggests.According to the online property portal, house prices in the UK fell by 1.2 per cent in June - cancelling out the rise in costs registered in May.The new set of results drag the annual rate of inflation down to 0.1 per cent - with the average house price now standing at just under £240,000.Since the beginning of the credit crunch, mortgage firms have tightened up their lending criteria and have withdrawn several of their most generous home loans deals.Elsewhere, rising food and fuel costs have also put an increasing strain on household budgets.These economic conditions have applied downwards pressure on to house prices - and, Miles Shipside at Rightmove confirmed, homeowners are now getting the message that property cannot be sold for the same prices as before."In spite of the lowest housing transactions for 30 years, new sellers had been coming to the market asking record prices; it was a mad state of affairs that defied the laws of economics," he said."Thankfully, new sellers are now taking some proactive steps to price more realistically from the outset to attract increasingly hard-pressed buyers."
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